A Night of Darkness
by Commander Argus
Summary: Kim is feeling alone as a winter rain storm rages


**_A Night of Darkness_**

**_by Nelson Binch AKA Commander Argus_**

**_Rated: T (PG)_**

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This is a submission for the April contest atRon Stoppable dot net andis part of the Trinity Sitch continuity and takes place just a few months after "Heart of the Fury" (yes, there be spoilers here! Not bigguns, but there are some)

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The weather in Middleton always seemed to be very fickle, almost freakish at times, especially during the winter.

When most people think of Colorado, they think of mountains. Places like Denver or Durango always come to mind. Middleton was at a much lower elevation, though it was surrounded by foothills and close enough to one mountain that it also shared its name.

Normally in February one would expect snow to blanket the land and quite often it did. Then again, the city was noted for its fair weather, at least most of the time. Both the summers and the winters could be considered fairly mild. To some it seemed the sun was almost always out and the sky was always blue.

That wasn't really the case. Into each life a little rain must fall. Or, in some cases, a whole lot of it.

The rain had been coming down for three days now. Not only was it raining instead of snowing, it was warmer than it should have been for that time of year. For that, at least, Kim was thankful. Snow she could deal with, but freezing rain was a shade of miserable she wouldn't wish on her worst enemy.

She closed the blinds of the balcony window at the end of her second floor hallway. In the back of her mind she started griping all over again that her room always seemed to be upstairs. That never seemed to matter when she was a little girl or a teen. Her loft bedroom had essentially been on the third floor of her childhood home. Childhood? She had been twenty when she finally moved out, into a second-floor apartment with Ron during their senior year of college.

The stairs didn't bother her then, either, though Ron did gripe about hauling his mountain-bike up and down those same stairs. At one point he finally gave up, leaving it chained up in the basement instead, to the point he brought it out less and less, especially considering they found fewer and fewer chances to run up to Mount Middleton that last year of school.

Then they bought this place. It was a two-story townhouse condo with three bedrooms, plus another room downstairs that could easily be converted into a fourth. When they had gotten married seven and a half months earlier the place wasn't quite ready, taking a full month before they were finally ready to get out of the cramped little apartment that had seemed so cozy when they first moved in eleven months earlier.

The condo, by comparison, was huge. It was really a tad smaller than the house Kim had grown up in and maybe a bit bigger than Ron's, but for a young couple alone, especially two relatively small people like themselves, the place seemed like a great empty mansion.

The whole idea was for them to have a home they could live in for many years. The extra bedrooms provided space they would use when it came time to start a family. In the mean time, one of the smaller bedrooms had been claimed by Ron, purportedly to serve as his home-office. Indeed there was a desk in there with a very modern computer console, tied directly to an entertainment center. The monitor itself would have made a graphic artist squeal for joy.

Ron, of course, spent many hours at that desk playing the latest version of Zombie Mayhem, or occasionally renewing old friendships in the world of Everlot. Kim didn't mind. It made him happy and it was certainly better than him spending late hours at a bar or doing some other 'married guy' sort of thing.

As much as he had a hand in setting up his office, which he had jokingly dubbed 'the Swamp' after the tent shared by three officers in an old Korean War sitcom, Kim took firm control of their bedroom. The room, though larger in floor space than their whole old apartment, was rather cozy. There was a fireplace in front of a small sitting area, including a nice, large over-stuffed couch. It wasn't the prettiest couch on the planet, but it was warm and soft and oh-so comfortable. The pretty furniture was downstairs in the formal living room. That couch had been dubbed 'the rack' by Ron, who almost refused to sit on it. He called the whole room a museum piece and only used it to entertain guests for business. Considering what he did for a living, that didn't happen terribly often in their home.

Besides the comfortable furniture, there was also an extremely large bed. It was a custom-built extended length King Sized four-poster bed that sat almost three feet off the floor. While neither of them were very tall they had gotten in the habit of sleeping with a large pile of pillows and even on the 'California Queen' bed they used in the apartment, Ron's feet tended to hang off the end by morning.

Kim made the comment the bed had a lot of wasted space the first couple months after the wedding, considering they only used a space smaller than the full-sized bed she had grown up sleeping in. Then, like most married couples, they found themselves using more and more space, staking out their own particular territory when it actually came to sleeping in the massive bed.

All of those things were picked out by both of them. Ron wanted comfortable and Kim agreed wholeheartedly. The room was stylish and beautiful but all that was secondary. No, the one thing she had put her foot down about was how the room was equipped. There was no television in there. There was no radio, though music could be piped in from the main entertainment center downstairs. There wasn't even a telephone, though for safety reasons there was one right outside in the hallway. The room was their own inner sanctum, a place where it was just Ron and her and when they spent time together in there they would turn the ringer off and let it go to voice mail. It would only ring if certain people dialed a special number, and then only in emergencies.

She rubbed her lower back as she walked down the hall. Her back was hurting more and more often lately. She was also spending more and more time on her side of the bed, for the same reason she was now lamenting having her room upstairs.

Opening the door to the bedroom closest to hers, she peered inside the darkened room. Strangely enough, the little occupant did not like sleeping with a night-light. At four years old she was singularly unafraid of the dark. She supposed that she would have felt secure at that age if she was able to blast any potential boogie-men to smithereens.

The child had lived with them for a few months now. She called her 'Aunt Kimmie,' though they really weren't related by blood, any more than the child's mother, who had once been her worst enemy, could be called her sister. All that aside, she had not hesitated for an instant to take care of the little girl, at least until her mother returned.

When that would happen, she had no clue.

It seemed amusing to her that, at twenty-two and a half, she had never held any steady job except babysitting, and here she was doing it again.

Gently closing the door, Kim sat down on the parson's bench in the hallway, resting her back just a little. She checked her watch, wondering again where Ron was. It was getting late, but the meetings at Bueno Nacho had been known to run late and she was loath to call him just in case he was still in the meeting.

Those meetings had been getting tense of late. Ron was thankful for the open-ended job the fast food chain had given him, allowing him the flexibility to serve on Team Possible when needed but as he settled into a routine there he started realizing his hard-won skills in the culinary arts were not being put to use. He was a glorified mouthpiece and even after just a few months he was bored with it. He was qualified to be a chef, not a regional manager for a company that sold pre-fabricated food at more the thirty thousand locations worldwide.

Much as he wanted to, though, he couldn't just up and quit. There were contracts involved. Some would go on as long as the company existed. His father had seen to that after the royalties debacle when he was fifteen. It was the job he accepted later, right after graduating from college that was the problem. They had their hooks in him and weren't about to let go.

What he really wanted to do was to take part of the thirty-eight million he had in the bank and open his own restaurant. In fact he'd started down that road already, purchasing a building and starting to formulate plans, just as he had been trained to do in culinary school. The main problem came when the legal boys at Bueno Nacho started getting concerned about corporate secrets and the like, not to mention opening a restaurant in direct competition with them.

The fact he was planning to serve haute cuisine and not fast-food tex-mex notwithstanding.

They were close to hammering out an agreement. Ron would still be featured as the inventor of the Naco and several other dishes at the chain, but his responsibilities would be shifted to the man who usually did all the real work; Ned. That was fine with her. A restaurant would demand long hours, but they would be long hours close to home, not at a corporate headquarters a hundred miles west that seemed to call on him more than every other day.

Kim sighed, wishing he was home. She ran a hand over her abdomen, her fingers crossing the slightly shiny decal printed on the sky-blue t-shirt she wore. It was a single large arrow pointing downward. She had just about reached the point where the four-letter word inscribed beneath the arrow was another kind of four-letter word. That particular shirt she most def would not wear out in public, no matter how cute Ron or her mother thought it was. In fact, as small as she was she didn't even start showing until she was about four months along, at least if she wore the right kind of clothing.

If you had told Kim Possible Stoppable on the day of her wedding seven months earlier that she would be pregnant at twenty-two, she would have called you crazy.

It was her own fault, really. Well, Ron did play a part, a very big part, but it was her own goof-up involving her birth control pills that had a little boy growing inside her. She wasn't upset, in fact, the whole prospect of being a mother excited her. It was just that she thought she would have a few years of it just being her and Ron before this kind of responsibility set in.

At least her cravings were of a completely pedestrian sort. They tended to rotate between Fudge Ripple Ice Cream, Muy Caliente Cheesidillas and fried chicken and fortunately not all at the same time. The first two were simple enough. There were probably four quarts of the ice cream in the freezer at that moment, she could text Ron to pick up the Bueno Nacho but the fried chicken, that was a bit tougher…

…she absolutely could not stand fast-food fried chicken. Not the kind that came in a bucket, not the kind that shared its name with a cartoon sailor. No, not even Ron could make it the particular way she preferred, though his examples were quite fine when she wasn't in her current condition. He tended to get a little fancy with it, using pecans in his crust along with No, she craved her Nana's fried yard bird. Even more than her famous lemon-squares she wanted that deep-fried creation only her Grandmother could make.

Considering she was in the foothills of Colorado and Nana lived in Fort Summerdell Florida, the only craving she was going to sate at this particular moment involved vanilla ice cream shot through with sticky, gooey chocolate fudge.

Grabbing her sore back again she clumsily got up off the parson's bench. She had only gained about twenty-five pounds at this point, but she somehow felt like she was twice as heavy as the hundred ten pound she weighed at her wedding. How could the same woman who could leap more than her own height straight up suddenly be so weighed down?

Halfway down the staircase lightning flashed, followed instantly by thunder that would have blown in the windows if they hadn't been made of special bullet-proof glass. She didn't like the thought of having to armor her house that way, but over the years she had made some pretty nasty enemies and Global Justice had almost insisted. It didn't help that Ron agreed.

By the time she opened her eyes and uncovered her ears she noticed it was now pitch black in her home.

Closing her eyes again she counted to ten. It was no use getting angry or upset. The only other person inside the house was a soundly sleeping four-year old who was for all intents and purposes now her foster-child and she was not about to yell at her (not because Amethyst had powers strikingly similar to her mother's but because she dearly loved the child and never wanted to raise her voice to her in anger.)

No, there was no use getting angry, but couldn't this have waited five minutes so she could get a quart of ice cream out of the freezer? She'd been taught since she was little never to open a freezer in a blackout.

Kim had been grumpy before. Now she was just plain ticked off. She sat down in the middle of the stairs and rested her chin on her fists. She felt bloated and huge and was wearing a floppy legged pair of jeans that were a couple inches too long, considering they were borrowed and she just hadn't been able to bring herself to go out and buy actual maternity clothing just yet. On top of all that she was wearing that stupid T-shirt with its stupid arrow that pointed to her stomach and said "Baby" as if anyone who looked at her couldn't tell she was pregnant. She was too petite for anyone to mistake her for chubby once she really started showing, so the shirt was dumb and she made sure to let Ron know how dumb it was at every opportunity.

Interestingly enough, she still wore it.

A tiny voice reached her. "Aunt Kimmie?"

She turned around and in the pale momentary light of the storm outside she could make out the small figure standing at the top of the stairs, holding a well-chewed Super-Star Edition Pandaroo. Ron had pulled some strings to buy the ultra-rare Cuddlebuddy for his then-fiancé not long after they got engaged but once Amethyst was born (in Kim's room, no less!) she thought it would make a good gift. Her own normal Pandaroo really meant more to her since she had slept with it since she was tiny so making a gift of the other felt really good. It didn't matter the toddler had destroyed most of its special value, the girl loved the doll and just about couldn't be parted from it.

"Stay right there, Ammie. It's too dark and you might fall on the stairs."

At that, the little girl held up her free hand. It was surrounded by what looked like glowing purple flames. Wade and Global Justice did every test they could think of on her DNA and nothing indicated she would have any of those powers, but they were still there. It created quite enough light to see by, though she still minded her 'Aunt' and stood her ground there at the top of the stairs.

"Thank you, Ammie." Kim said as she carefully climbed up where she was. "Let's go find a flashlight and a couple candles so you don't burn anything."

"I'm just glowing, Aunt Kimmie. It's not my burn light."

Kim shook her head slightly. Amethyst spoke a lot more like an eight-year old than a four-year old and had already learned to read. She often wondered if she got that from her mother or her natural father or if the child was just naturally smart. She knew the mother was extremely smart, though a touch on the lazy side.

Fighting down the urge to take the child's hand, just in case she wasn't in as good a control of her glow-power as she said, she led her back to the master bedroom. Right outside the room was a small table with a land-line telephone. She picked up the receiver and frowned. Normally when the power went out the phones still worked, even the advanced cordless ones like this.

Amethyst waited patiently at the door of the large bedroom. Normally they had a very strict rule she wasn't to come into the room uninvited, mainly so they wouldn't have to have any uncomfortable conversations with the precocious youngster. She may have been incredibly intelligent for her age but she was still only four years old.

Kim opened her nightstand and took out a tiny but powerful flashlight. It was a military model, meant to be attached to an assault rifle but she had a much more benign use for it. The battery could run for several days, but she didn't want to waste it. She opened a couple more drawers and found her candle lighter.

Smiling a bit, considering the usual reason she lit candles around her bedroom, she wandered around lighting a few of them. Once the room was bathed in a comfortable orange glow she doused the tactical light and waved for Ammie to come on in.

"Be really careful around the candles Ammie and don't touch any of them. You understand?"

"Yes ma'am." She nodded.

She sat her down on the end of the never-made bed just as a thought occurred to her. This was the first time the power had gone out since they had been in their new home, so she had momentarily forgotten the fact there was supposed to be an emergency backup generator that would automatically come on during a blackout.

Why didn't it come on?

She glanced over at Amethyst, who was already curling up with a loose pillow. Kim was relatively confident she would mind where it came to the candles but years of taking care of children that age made her loath to leave her with such a potential hazard. The problem was the controls for the backup power system were in the basement. It was one of Wade's creations, a tiny cold-fusion power generator identical to the ones that powered their cars. In fact, it could generate enough power for the whole row of townhouses and still have juice to spare and could run for months. The only reason they didn't rely totally on it was that it was supposed to be a secret.

The fact the phones were out too bothered her. Enough that she decided on another course of action entirely. The controls were easy enough to work, but if something was wrong with the system there was nothing she could do about it.

Taking her cell-phone out of her pocket Kim touched a control. The picturesque fountain on the display screen disappeared, replaced with a green and yellow "KP" emblem on a black background. One more touch of the hidden button and the call went out.

She waited a minute, then another. The battery meter read full. The signal indicator was completely off, but the call she was making didn't rely on any nearby cell towers, which might have been knocked offline by the blackout.

Frowning, she folded the tiny phone back up. Using the flashlight she took one more look at the once again sleeping child and made her way down the hall to Ron's office. She found what she was looking for quickly, choosing a hand-held Mark II model instead of her newer bracelet style Mark III. Something was tickling the back of her mind and if it were true, either one would have been better protected against it than the backup built into her phone.

The old Kimmunicator still had a full charge on it and lit up instantly when she hit the power switch. She was about to try calling Wade again when she heard the front door open.

"Ron?" She called out.

There was no answer.

Cold fear bit at her gut. Her mind flashed through a list of her worst enemies, trying to recall which ones were accounted for and which ones were not. She hit the emergency call button on the hand-held and waited a couple seconds. Nothing happened.

There was no sound coming from downstairs except for the driving rain. She could tell from the sound the door was still open, especially considering she had not heard it shut. A slight bit of panic surged in her. She could certainly still fight if it came to it, but she was frightened about what may happen to her baby.

A voice that didn't belong to Ron drifted up to her from the foyer. "Kimberly." It said softly. The voice was a man's and it sounded oddly familiar. For a heartbeat she was frozen in place, crouching beside Ron's desk, uncertain what to do. She was even starting to lament the fact they owned no firearms.

"Kimberly?" The voice came again, still coming from downstairs. Frantically she pushed the button on her Kimmunicator again. Where was Wade? He had the same kind of backups on his mainframe and if he was still at the Space Center his workstation there was completely shielded and connected to its own power supply.

Then the voice said something that sent chills down her spine.

"Here kitty, kitty, kitty." He said softly.

Suddenly she was seventeen again, trapped in a warehouse that had since been demolished. Only one person had taunted her like that and it was the one time she had been in fear of more than just her life.

Carrion!

He knew how to jam communication signals, even such carefully protected systems as her Kimmunicators. It was also very likely he had set off some kind of electro-magnetic pulse to disable the power systems of her home.

Slowly she got to her feet. This time it wasn't just her and her unborn child to think about, there was also Amethyst. Anger started replacing some of the fear that gripped her. How dare he threaten her family this way. There might have been no blood-bond between her and that child, but she was still family.

With measured, silent steps she walked out into the hallway, dousing the light in her hand. She put the useless Kimmunicator on the hall table and stood at the top of the stairs.

A flash of lightning briefly backlit the figure standing in her doorway. It was the shape of a man, one who stood roughly six feet tall, slender but muscular. Even in the darkness she could see his features clearly in her mind. Dark blonde hair, fair skin, a square-cut jaw and brown eyes that were a mockery of the beautiful eyes of her husband.

He held up his hand, displaying something that started giving off a faint white glow. It was a crystal and she knew what it would be capable of doing. Slowly the light grew until she could see those same hated features that had been in her mind's eye.

"Hello, kitty." He said softly. He reached behind him and quietly closed the door.

"Get…out…of…my...house." Kim growled through clenched teeth.

"Is that any way to greet an old friend?" He asked in the same mockingly pleasant tone. Smiling, he held the crystal forth. Light jumped from it, reaching for Kim. There was no way to avoid it, the beam struck her.

Kim's eyes snapped open. She was sitting on the Parson's bench in her upstairs hallway. Cold sweat was running off her forehead.

She looked around. The hall lights were off but she could see the lights downstairs. The door was open to Ron's office and she could see the screensaver playing in there, bathing the room in the soft glow of the monitor.

Jumping up, she ran to her bedroom. The small lights on either side of the bed were one, but none of the candles were lit. Carefully she checked each one. The wax was cold and hard. They hadn't been lit for hours, if not days.

Slowly she let a breath out. Could that have just been a nightmare? Did she simply doze off when she sat down?

Almost running, she went back to Amethyst's room. The child was still sound asleep in her bed, tightly clutching her Pandaroo.

She went back to her room and slowly sat down on the bed, tears running down her cheeks. It was a dream, just a dream, one she hadn't had now in years. Still, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and switched it over to Kimmunicator mode.

"Hi Kim." Wade said cheerily. It was late, but he often didn't go to bed until the wee hours of the morning.

"Wade, run a check on Colorado State Prison for me."

"Anyone in particular?"

"Him." She said softly.

Wade knew instantly who she was speaking of. "He's still there Kim."

"Thanks, Wade. You rock."

"Kim, are you alright? Do you need me to come over or anything?"

"Thanks, Wade, but I'm okay. Just a bad dream, that's all."

"You sure? I mean, if you're asking about him?"

"It's okay. I'm just a little worked up over the storm, that's all."

"Okay, but I'm going to leave the line open, just in case. Yori and I can be there in five if you need us."

"Thanks. I'll talk to you tomorrow." She shut the screen off and closed her eyes.

Kim about jumped out of her skin when she heard the front door again. Only this time, it was the sound of somebody turning a key in the lock. Moments later a totally soaked Ron stepped inside, a small shape jumping out of his pocket and bounding toward the kitchen.

"Kim? You home? I brought you some Cheesidillas!"

Heedless of her stiff back she ran down the stairs and grabbed him in a crushing hug.

All of her grumpiness was gone, replaced with an overwhelming feeling of safety and love.

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Kim Possible and all related characters © Disney 


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